1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to video content detection, and more particularly, to a highlight detecting circuit and related method for video highlight detection utilizing an audio signal to determine a highlight segment within a video signal.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Consider a video program containing large segments of content that are uninteresting to a viewer but the same video program also contains individual events interspersed within that contact that the viewer finds very interesting. Extracting the interesting events while discarding the boring and uninteresting content allows the viewer to less thoroughly watch the video program. The viewer can spend more time viewing only the video segments that are considered exciting. For example, during a baseball game, most of the time the audience is waiting. It takes some time for a next hitter to walk up to the plate after a previous hitter is called out. It takes some time for a pitcher to exchange signals with a catcher before they reach a consensus on what kind of ball is going to be delivered. It also takes some time for a change of inning when both teams switch the roles as offense and defense sides. Exciting events, such as home runs, scoring, and double plays exist sparsely in long baseball games. For baseball fans or regular viewers, it is difficult for them to always have plenty of time to be sitting in front of a TV and watching the whole game thoroughly. Baseball highlight detection could help extract those exciting moments and skip those waiting times.
Some prior art methods have been proposed to deal with these kinds of highlight detection problems. These methods utilize a probabilistic framework to deal with this problem and need training data to estimate the parameters of probability models. In this way, the computational complexity is very high, and the execution speed is slow, resulting in difficulty in implementing the prior art method on an embedded system.